The close relationship between the Irish republic and the Roman Catholic Church was highlighted by the visit of Pope John Paul II to Ireland in 1979, the first visit there by a reigning pontiff. But the fraying of that relationship, signaled in the 1960s and ’70s by a collapse in vocations to the priesthood and a decline in attendance at mass, continued in the 1980s and ’90s. The clause in the 1937 constitution acknowledging the special position of the Roman Catholic Church had been removed in 1972, although in 1983 the conservative resistance of Catholic pressure groups resulted in a referendum on a draft constitutional amendment reinforcing the republic’s existing ban on abortion. After a divisive campaign, with barely a majority of the electorate voting in the referendum, voters approved the amendment.

In 1985 the church vainly opposed the government’s liberalization of legislation concerning contraception. Church-state relations were tested again the following year when a referendum to remove the constitutional ban against divorce was defeated. A second referendum on abortion, which strengthened the existing antiabortion law but enabled women to travel overseas to obtain an abortion, was approved in 1992. A Supreme Court ruling that year (in the “X” case) permitting limited abortion highlighted the need for legislation to guide medical practitioners. Many Irish continued to believe that a simple ban on abortion was required, but that approach came up against the Irish constitution’s guarantee of the rights of the individual. The failure of successive governments to act on the matter came to the fore in 2012 following the death of a woman whose request for an abortion had been denied by University College Hospital officials in Galway just days before she died there following a miscarriage. In response to domestic and international outrage at the woman’s death, legislation was passed in 2013 allowing abortion in cases when a mother’s life was in danger.

A referendum on lifting the ban on divorce was held in 1995 and was passed by only a small majority; divorce became legal in 1997. In May 2015 Ireland became the first country in the world to approve same-sex marriage by referendum when 62 percent of participating voters gave their approval to the measure allowing it. This result and the election of the openly gay Varadkar reflected a profound shift in Irish society away from its traditional social conservatism and toward progressive values that in May 2018 came to encompass legalized abortion when some two-thirds of those Irish voters who went to the polls passed a referendum on amending the constitution to remove its ban on abortion.

In 1992 the church was rocked by the first of a series of scandals when the bishop of Galway, Eamon Casey, resigned after it was discovered that he was the father of a teenage son. In 1995 controversy over the extradition to Northern Ireland of a pedophile priest, Brendan Smyth, brought down the Irish government. In 1999 the government announced the establishment of a commission to investigate the abuse that had been widespread until the 1970s in industrial and reformatory schools. Similar government commissions of inquiry conducted during the next decade culminated in the publication of the Murphy Report in 2009 (which reached devastating conclusions on the extent of concealment of priestly pedophilia in the Dublin archdiocese), in multiple episcopal resignations, in Pope Benedict XVI’s summoning the Irish hierarchy to Rome, and, on March 20, 2010, in a papal letter apologizing to all victims of Catholic clerical sex abuse and announcing a formal Vatican investigation of Irish dioceses, seminaries, and religious orders affected by the scandal.

Relations with Northern Ireland

In 1957 the Irish government introduced internment without trial in response to an IRA campaign of attacks on British army and customs posts along the border with Northern Ireland that had begun in 1956 and lasted until 1962. An attempt to ease cross-border tensions was made in 1965 when Lemass exchanged visits with Terence O’Neill, Northern Ireland’s prime minister.

The Irish government was increasingly preoccupied with the continuing violence in Northern Ireland that had first erupted in 1969. Lynch’s dismissal of two of his ministers in 1970 following an attempt to import arms for use in Northern Ireland paved the way for a consensual approach, with all major parties increasingly committed to cooperating with the British government in seeking a peaceful resolution. Thus, Lynch’s government supported the British government’s suspension of the Northern Ireland parliament and government and the introduction of direct rule from Westminster in March 1972. In December 1973, after the establishment of a power-sharing executive (composed of nationalists as well as unionists) in Northern Ireland, Liam Cosgrave’s government participated in talks with Edward Heath, prime minister of Britain, and the power-sharing executive, which resulted in the Sunningdale Agreement. This accord recognized that Northern Ireland’s relationship with Britain could not be changed without the agreement of a majority of its population, and it provided for the establishment of a Council of Ireland composed of members from both the Dáil and the Northern Ireland assembly. But direct rule was reimposed when that agreement collapsed in May 1974 because of a general strike inspired by unionist opponents of power-sharing.

Although the republic experienced nothing like the scale of the continuing violence in Northern Ireland, there were a number of serious terrorist incidents. On May 17, 1974, three car bombs in Dublin and one in Monaghan caused an eventual death toll of 33 (the largest number killed on any one day since the violence began in 1970). The IRA’s murder of the British ambassador in Dublin in 1976 led to a state of emergency and the unpopular measure of strengthening emergency-powers legislation, and the assassination at his holiday home in Sligo of Earl Louis Mountbatten of Burma (Britain’s last viceroy in India) by the IRA in 1979 further intensified opposition to terrorism.

In 1981 FitzGerald launched a constitutional crusade to make the reunification of Ireland more attractive to Northern Ireland’s Protestants. At the end of the year, the Irish and British governments set up an Anglo-Irish intergovernmental council to discuss matters of common concern, especially security. In 1984 the report of the New Ireland Forum—a discussion group that included representatives of political parties in Ireland and Northern Ireland—set out three possible frameworks for political development in Ireland: a unitary state, a federal state, and joint sovereignty. Fianna Fáil preferred a unitary state, which Fine Gael and Labour regarded as unrealistic; they preferred the federal option. In November 1985 at Hillsborough in Northern Ireland, Ireland and Britain again agreed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would come about only with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland, and an intergovernmental conference was established to deal with political, security, and legal relations between the two parts of the island.

Despite Fianna Fáil’s initial criticism of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Haughey government worked the agreement. Contacts between the Irish and British governments continued after February 1987 within the formal structure of the intergovernmental conference. Fears that the violence in Northern Ireland would spill into Ireland as a consequence of closer Anglo-Irish cooperation in the wake of the agreement proved unfounded.

In 1993 the Irish and British governments signed a joint peace initiative (the Downing Street Declaration), in which they pledged to seek mutually agreeable political structures in Northern Ireland and between the two islands. In 1994 the IRA declared a cease-fire, and for the next 18 months there was considerable optimism that a new period of political cooperation between north and south had been inaugurated. The cease-fire collapsed in 1996, however, and the IRA resumed its bombing campaign.

In 1998 the taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, played an important role in brokering the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), which would create a Northern Ireland Assembly, establish north-south political structures, and amend Ireland’s 1937 constitution by removing from it the de jure claim to Northern Ireland. On May 22, 1998, the agreement was approved by 94 percent of voters in Ireland and by 71 percent in Northern Ireland. With the establishment of the power-sharing assembly, the Irish government continued to remain active in promoting peace and economic development in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Assembly’s assumption of power was halting, however, and was suspended intermittently, largely in response to the failure of the paramilitary forces to fully decommission and disarm. But in May 2007, following another round of new elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly and two years after the IRA’s abandonment of armed struggle, power sharing became a reality in Northern Ireland.

When voters in the United Kingdom chose in a 2016 referendum for Britain to leave the European Union (“Brexit”), the peaceful stasis brought about by the Good Friday Agreement was threatened by the possibility of the reimposition of a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. During the protracted negotiations between the United Kingdom and the EU and especially during the domestic political infighting that unfolded in Britain, the issue of the Ireland–Northern Ireland border was front and centre. According to the initial agreement negotiated by British Prime Minister Theresa May, a so-called Northern Ireland backstop plan was established under which the open border would be preserved by a legally binding customs arrangement between the EU and Northern Ireland that would go into effect if the U.K. and the EU could not reach a long-term agreement by December 2020. Widespread vehement opposition to the backstop was one of the principal reasons May’s version of Brexit failed to win approval in the British Parliament. Under the revised agreement negotiated and implemented by May’s successor as prime minister, Boris Johnson, the backstop was replaced by a plan to keep Northern Ireland aligned with the EU for at least four years from the end of the transition period, at which time the Northern Ireland government could opt out of the relationship if it chose to do so.

Meanwhile, the sanctity of the Good Friday Agreement also was endangered by the collapse of the Northern Ireland Executive in January 2017, in the wake of a scandal involving a renewable energy scheme. Not until January 2020 was the Executive restored. The rapprochement came about after long-term negotiations involving the British and Irish governments, as well as Northern Ireland’s five leading political parties, resulted in the “New Decade, New Approach” agreement.